


we wait somehow, in that place between now or never

by aiineslin



Category: Narcos: Mexico (TV)
Genre: M/M, One-Sided Attraction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-04
Updated: 2020-10-04
Packaged: 2021-03-07 20:14:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,740
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26813470
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aiineslin/pseuds/aiineslin
Summary: he had never been anywhere without walt.
Relationships: Sal Orozco/Original Male Character, Sal Orozco/Walt Breslin
Kudos: 4





	we wait somehow, in that place between now or never

**Author's Note:**

> really just something that hung around half-finished in my documents, and i kinda just finished this in a day through half-remembered plotlines and some wiki help  
> ,may edit this, idk.  
> anyways i liked walt and his crew
> 
> title taken from stereo honey - where no one knows your name

They were in Washington, under the dull glow of a streetlamp. Behind them, the strip club’s music played on, bass muffled behind heavy doors.

There were dark circles beneath Walt’s eyes, his fingers twitched slightly, jerkily - plucking absently at the stitching of his jacket.

He hadn’t slept well, Sal knew, ever since they had been given the official orders to fall back.

When Walt reached for his cigarettes, and took out his lighter - Sal noted the amount of fluid within. He had been, unsurprisingly, smoking a lot. Walt was a creature of habit in many ways. 

“It’s okay, Walt.”

The curve of Walt’s spine, bending. His head hanging low, a dead weight. Smoke drifted from the pillar of ash building on the end of his unsmoked cigarette. In the distance, a car alarm went off, shrill and screeching. 

Sal reached out, touched Walt’s shoulder gently, carefully. 

“I’ll go where you go,” Sal continued quietly. “It doesn’t end here, no?”

*

Only it does.

They split them up.

Sal was sent to Phoenix.

There was an empty seat that had been waiting for Kenny, after all. Anybody would do. 

In Phoenix, they give him a pokey apartment that skirts the edges of the city. When he made his reconnoitring lap around the surrounding streets, he found a grocery store, several run-down looking eating places, and that suited Sal just fine. It looked just like any other big city, when it was broken down to its meanest components. Tía Lucia had already called him a few days before his move, demanding his new address and phone number.

The first person he called was Walt, after he had pulled aside the curtains to let in some sunlight into the gloom.

When he called Walt from the Bakelite phone, he was directed to voicemail.

“There’s a couple of lakes up here,” he said after the beep. His voice hung unnaturally still and clear in the dusty silence of the apartment. Sal looked down. A cockroach crept past his foot. “You should come up here sometime. When you can. After you have settled into your new place. Give me a call, yeah?”

He nudged the cockroach away, watching it speed away on its little legs.

*

Phoenix was.

Phoenix was different.

He had never been anywhere without Walt.

(“Fucking conjoined twins,” one of the lads in Washington had called them good-naturedly.)

Somehow or other, the bureaucratic gods had always seen fit to put them both together. It was only now, did he realise how _rare_ that actually was, to have a partner that lasted for over a decade.

It felt strange, no matter how Sal tried not to look at it head-on. But it still snuck through, in little moments, a sneaky pinch from his new reality. 

(A few days after he had left the message, Walt called. He sounded distracted, harried, and far too tired. “God,” he had said, exhaling over the phone, the sigh broken up into crackles. “I don’t know anybody here. Not one person. Shit.” A wet, rattling cough. “I shouldn’t talk so much about myself. How are you, Sal?” “I’m good, I’m fine,” Sal had answered mechanically, and all he had wanted to say was, “Are you eating well? Are you eating those fucking microwaved dinners again? You know they fuck your stomach up, Walt, goddamn - I thought I taught you how to cook.” but the call had ended far too soon, Walt the first to hang up.)

Sal didn’t smoke, an aberrance, really. But he always kept a lighter in his jacket for Walt.

They were working a stakeout, a grind of a job staring down the unmoving doors of a suspicious warehouse when Peter’s lighter ran out of fluid. Without thinking, he had palmed the lighter into his hand and passed it over.

As Peter lit up, he levelled a puzzled stare at Sal. 

“You don’t smoke?” A questioning lilt softening a known statement.

Sal shrugged. Heat warmed the back of his neck lightly.

“My partner - ex-partner was a heavy smoker.”

*

Tía Lucia had made good on her threat to hunt him down if he didn’t pay her a visit. He recognised her car when he came pulling into his lot after work, a bright shade of cherry red, furry dice and an elaborate cross dangling from the rearview mirror. 

She was as he remembered, hair kept shiny and unnaturally black, eyes lined in brown, her feet clad in exceptionally sensible orthopaedic shoes.

“Gordito,” she said severely.

“Tía,” Sal said, and swooped in for a kiss and a hug, and she melted instantly - tía Lucia could never stay angry at her favourite nephew for long, after all. “I’ve been busy at work, sorry.”

“I can tell. What time is it now? Eight?”

“They run me ragged, tía,” Sal said, dropping his chin on her shoulder. 

“Come now,” she said. “I have dinner at home.”

Dinner was chicken quesadillas, atole and fruits - and as Sal sipped the warm drink, he savoured its sweetness as tía Lucia’s voice washed over him, a flood of news and gossip pulled together from the Orozco network of aunts, uncles and cousins. All that was required from him was a few interjections here and there, murmurs of affirmation and shock where appropriate.

And then tía Lucia said, “Is Walt in Phoenix too?”

“Oh.” He paused. “No, they sent him to Sacramento.”

“What a pity. I would’ve liked to meet him,” Tía Lucia said. “He sounded nice.”

“Walt? Nah. Nah, he’s not nice, but he’s always there when you need him.”

“He sounded nice to _you_ ,” said tía Lucia, and something welled up in his heart, a wail of an emotion surging against its walls. 

“I guess so. I guess so.”

Tía Lucia wrapped an arm around him, hauling him in for a hug, and he did not shrink away from it. 

*

It was easy enough to find bars where people with similar needs converged. There was always a whisper network that one could tap in, or failing that, you just drove around late at night until the familiar tells of a friendly bar surfaced. 

Maybe it had been a while since a new face showed up on the Phoenix scene, but it was easier, far easier than Sal had anticipated to pull. 

He settled on a cowboy, a tall, rangy man with sad grey eyes, a five o’clock shadow and an incongruously soft voice.

The cowboy was gentle when he needed to be, and did his duties with a laser-focus precision.

At the end of it, they lie next to each other under the ceiling fan, watching the blades cut indolently through the air.

“You’ve got someone on your mind, haven’t you?” 

For a moment, Sal felt sorry. It couldn’t have been pleasant, to have done what they did, and to know the other was somewhere else. But there was something approaching understanding in the cowboy’s eyes.

“My partner.”

“Didn’t figure you to be a taken man.” A sharpness.

“My partner at work,” Sal corrected, turning over onto his side. City lights traced the bulk of the cowboy’s torso. He reached out then, to wipe away a bead of sweat that trickled over the edge of his cheekbone. Summer heat pressed against Sal, a prickling blanket. 

“I see.”

“Yeah.”

There wasn’t much to be said after that. Everybody had a story like that, after all. 

The cowboy left him in the morning with a perfunctory kiss on his cheek, dry and bristly. 

*

The days pass by, slow as honey.

Tía Lucia made it a point to visit him every so often, bearing gifts of food and gossip. He cooked with her and for her at those times, and once, Walt called when tía Lucia was over. Both had gotten along like a house on fire, built on the kindling of shared good-natured jabs and anecdotes about Sal. 

He grew more familiar with Peter’s working style; it was tighter, more focused and regimented as compared to Walt’s, easier to learn in a way. And from Peter, he made friends with the other guys - Lorenzo and Mark and Keith and on and on it went, a new stream of names that he had to commit to his memory. 

When he needed to, Sal would hit the friendly bars. The cowboy - Ian, his name was - came back home with him most days, there was an _understanding_ \- after all, and he was kind, far kinder than what Sal was used to.

Some weekends, Ian would even stay later in the mornings to eat breakfast with Sal - which Sal had come to understand as his particular brand of quiet sacrifice, given the early days of most farmhands. 

“I’ll be heading down to Texas at the end of the month,” Ian said to him one Sunday. A smear of scrambled egg remained at the corner of his lip, and Sal reached over to wipe it away. As he did, Ian blinked. “I. I’ll be participating in the Mesquite Rodeo.”

“Huh,” Sal said. Images flickered into his mind’s eye. Rearing horses. Cornered, angry bulls. Dust being kicked up - images pulled from the telly and booze-smeared memories. “Good luck - shit is dangerous, isn’t it?”

“Hah, yeah, but I like to think I’m pretty good.” When he smiled, Ian’s entire being softened, his hangdog face lightening up, grey eyes growing merry. “Look, I was thinking. If you don’t have much going on, I don’t think you’ve been working any long cases lately - maybe - come with me?”

Perhaps it was a mark of how familiar they were becoming that Ian knew how heavy (or light, as it were) Sal’s workload was. 

Sal busied himself with forking a spoonful of bacon to his mouth. “I’m not sure if I can though, I mean, I just came to this branch - .. Doesn’t look good if I start taking leave so fast, yeah?”

The light flickered in Ian’s eyes, and his face shuttered. 

“I see. Nah, it’s alright, I understand. I was just asking. Just asking, is all.”

A few weeks later, when Sal left a good luck message on Ian’s voicemail, it went unreplied. 

When he next saw Ian at the bar, Ian had avoided his gaze carefully, and had made sure to leave with a short redhead with a bristly moustache.

And that, Sal supposed, was that. 

*

“Orozco,” As Keith walked past Sal’s desk, he dropped off a stack of folders and a surprise. “Got a guy outside, name of Breslin. Says he knows you.”

Sal had shot out of his chair, sped his walk up through the rabbit warren corridors of the Phoenix office, and slowed down when he neared the receptionist area. 

When he pushed the door open, Walt was seated there at the very edge of one of the old chairs, holding a plastic cup of half-drunk water in loosely-wrapped fingers.

“Hey,” Walt said. He had gotten paler, and there was a fullness to his cheeks that had not been there before.

“Hey,” Sal replied. “You look soft. Too many late night snacks?”

“Yeah. Yeah.” Walt looked down, laughed. There was a definite paunch to his belly that Sal did not remember. 

“Ah, you know what it’s like. They’ve been keeping me at the desk. The bureaucracy never ends.”

“Oh.” Sal, blinking. “I’ve still been out.”

“Yeah?”

Between them, Mexico. The hidden machinations of great nations grinding against each other. Lives fluttering out beneath the cogs, sent spinning into tangents. Reasons that one did not look at straight on, and spoke around; reasons that kept the man who spearheaded Leyenda languishing behind a desk in Sacramento, when he was a field agent through to his very bones. 

“You said there were lakes out here?” There was a silence that had not been there before. 

“Yeah! I mean, shit, I didn’t know you were driving down, or I would have taken an off day -...”

“No worries, this was - this was a spur of the moment thing…” Walt, running his hand over his short hair, shifting his weight from foot to foot.

And Sal found himself saying, the words falling out of his mouth without thinking - “Hey, man, you know what? I’ll ask my captain for a half day.”

“Seriously?”

“Yeah. I need a break anyways.”

“Yeah? You sure about this?” A half-smile tilting Walt’s lips crookedly. “What the hell has Phoenix done to you, man?”

“Fuck _off_ ,” said Sal mildly. 

*

It was easy enough after that. 

Vasquez had allowed the half day off with a minimal amount of begging - “Hope you don’t make a habit of this, Orozco, but it’s a slow day, and you haven’t taken leave since you came here.” - and Sal had taken Walt to his apartment, where they grabbed fishing rod, bait, beer and other paraphernalia before they hurried out to Sal’s car. 

“How long are you going to be here?”

“Ah, I took three days off so…”

“What, so you’re gonna have to leave.. Tomorrow morning? How much did you miss me, man?”

It was meant as good-natured ribbing, but the tired smile that spread across Walt’s face made Sal’s heart twinge.

“I knew I still had it,” Sal slapped his palm against the wheel, breaking the moment - and he shot a glance at Walt. “So. Eh. How’s Sacramento?”

“Less exciting than Texas, that’s for sure.”

Ah, so there would be no talk about Mexico.

It took nearly an hour to drive up to Scorpion Bay Marina, and during that time, they spent most of it talking about music. Turned out that Walt had started building his records collection in earnest, now that he knew he was going to be living in the same place for more than one month at a stretch.

“You should come visit me in Sacramento,” said Walt. “I’ll put on some Eagles for you.”

“Only if I can play Gloria Estefan,” countered Sal.

“You’re picking up your auntie’s tastes, huh.”

“ _Good_ taste, Walt. Good taste.”

The incoming argument, old and worn as it was, was averted when the massive signboard shouting Scorpion Bay Marina drew into view. 

This being an afternoon on a weekday - most of the rental boats were free, and it took less than ten minutes for Sal to pick a boat. 

It was almost ridiculously easy to fall back into old patterns.

While Walt baited the lines, Sal drove the boat out into the middle of the lake, setting it drifting when they had arrived near to the middle. Above them, the sun had reached its zenith, and sweat trickled down the line of Sal’s neck. 

Beer was cracked open, and they clinked together loudly, grinning at each other. The lines were thrown out, and they settled back, waiting, occasionally taking sips from their beer. 

It was a companionable sort of silence, nothing like the strange, awkward one that had hovered at the edges of the conversation at the DEA Phoenix offices just a few hours ago. 

Walt was the first one to break it. 

“I’ve been meaning to tell you. I was thinking about putting a transfer to Laredo.”

Sal looked over. “Thought you were getting used to Sacramento?”

“Yeah. But it’s a desk job.” Walt shrugged, his jaw working slightly. “I’ve got enough rest to last me for a decade in these six months.”

A pause that went on for far too long.

“I’ve been thinking about asking you,” Walt said. “To come with me to Laredo.” A sideways glance at Sal. “Thought this should be said in person, rather than over the phone.”

The world existed in heat and light, the Arizona sun burning upon his face. There was no-one out on the lake except for the two of them, and cradled as they were in its expansive blue, Sal could almost believe that they were the last two people in the world.

“You know I’m in.”

 _Nobody,_ Sal wanted to say, _can compare to you. Do you know how fucking boring it’s been here? Nobody is like you, Walt._

Water rippled away from the fishing lines, spreading in concentric circles.

The smile on Walt’s face was true and wide, genuine and brilliant. “Goddamn, Sal. You’ve always been here for me, huh?”

Movement in the water, larger this time. 

Walt looked away, eyes shaded by his cap. Smoke curled from the cigarette dangling loosely from his lips, and he shifted, peering out at the water.

“Hey, Sal. I think we’ve got a bite on your line.”

And all was good. 


End file.
